


westward the ocean

by Lake (beyond_belief)



Category: Salem's Lot - Stephen King
Genre: Gen, M/M, Mostly Gen, Prompt Fill, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 14:52:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9553508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beyond_belief/pseuds/Lake
Summary: "They crossed the country on a rambling southwest line in an old Citroën sedan, keeping mostly to secondary roads, traveling in fits and starts." - Stephen King, prologue to'salem's Lot





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smallearthcat (vamplover82)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vamplover82/gifts).



> This is barely, *barely* more Ben/Mark than King himself gets, buuuuuuuuut I figured I'd play it safe and warn for underage just in case.

The roads they traveled on were mostly flat, barren through the middle part of the day when the sun was at the tip of the sky and thick with commuter vehicles in the surrounding times. They kept away from the busiest of expressways, weathering the stops and starts at intersections in the hope that it would look less like they were running, though Ben wasn't sure who'd even notice their flight. Certainly not the commuters, staring forward through their windshields in the morning with careful Styrofoam cups of coffee. In the pale glow of the early rising sun, he sometimes envied these other drivers, going from their anonymous houses in anonymous suburbs to their anonymous jobs and blind to the horror in Jerusalem's Lot.

*

On the bumpy gray highway outside New Cordell, Ben hummed the chorus to Hammerstein's "Oklahoma", then sang some of the words under his breath, but Mark didn't look up from the map he was studying. The Citroën rattled over one gravel-filled pothole, then another. Neither was deep enough to do anything besides shake them in their seats. Still, Ben couldn't help his wince. He was relatively sure he could repair the car should anything minor happen, but he didn't want to be stranded in this place; didn't want Mark to be stranded in this place.

"When's tornado season?" Mark asked, turning his head to gaze up and out the window at the flat clouds that seemed to hang without moving above them.

Ben squinted up at the sky for a second, wondering what Mark saw. "Technically? Spring and summer, I think."

"Um, how about not technically?"

Meteorology wasn't exactly Ben's area of expertise. "Don't quote me on it, but if conditions are right for a tornado, I think they could happen any time. Why, did you see something?"

"No." Mark unlatched the glove box and took out the dusty, outdated Fodor's he'd found in a gas station in Missouri. Ben asked if he thought the Fodor's would mention tornadoes, but Mark didn't reply. 

They were the only car on this particular road, so Ben could swerve around the next visible pothole with ease. "If you want to get another cassette at the next station, you can," he said. The radio station they'd been listening to had faded into fuzz, and Mark had turned it off instead of fiddling with it, looking for something else. 

"The last place we stopped only had that one Hank Williams tape." 

Ben shrugged, then tried to resettle his stiff limbs in the cracked seat. It was an almost futile move after four hours of driving with each road bumpier than the one before it. "Well, I need to get out and walk around for a minute or two, so the next place you see, we'll stop."

A few minutes later, he turned south to avoid the turnpike again, and there was no gas station for half an hour.

*

In Clarendon, Texas, Ben decided they'd gone far enough for that day, and turned the Citroën into the small parking lot of a dingy-looking motel. "You can wait out here, if you want," he said to Mark, as he'd said to Mark at the last four places they had rented, but Mark shook his head and followed him, yawning and stretching, into the lobby, where a rickety-looking old man sat behind a counter watching a small black and white television. A beer sat by his elbow.

The old man's face was deeply wrinkled and flushed a healthy color. Ben couldn't help but notice that in people now, considered it to be a survival impulse. He signed the hotel register as Reginald Meyers and Son, paid in cash, and collected their key. 

"Room's down on the end, son," the old man said, barely looking away from his show. "Tavern at the end of the block if you boys need a meal."

"Thank you," Ben said, and put his hand on Mark's shoulder to steer him out onto the walk. "Hungry? I could walk down to that tavern and get us something if you want to lie down."

"I'll go with you." Mark stifled another yawn, then adjusted his glasses. His hand dropped to twist in the cord of the cross for a fleeting second. "I'm okay."

_Don't think I don't notice how you never want to be left alone_ , Ben thought, but said nothing as they put their duffel bags in the room. He supposed it odd that a thirteen year-old boy wouldn't want at least a few minutes to himself, but Mark was no ordinary teenager. They'd marked his birthday on a day his face had looked more pinched than usual, and when Ben had tried carefully (or maybe clumsily) to draw him out, he'd confessed to not knowing what to do with himself on a day he would have celebrated with his parents. 

Ben didn't know what to do either, but he bought them each a slice of pie at a diner in a little nowhere town outside Roanoke, VA: cherry for him and chocolate cream for Mark. "Somethin' to drink, sweetie?" the waitress asked, looking expectant.

"Coffee for me," Ben said. He looked at Mark, who wore a slightly questioning expression. "And I guess coffee for him, too."

The waitress brought cups and poured. Ben drank his black and didn't comment when Mark added extra milk to his and, after a second's hesitation, sugar from the dispenser. 

"Do you need anything?" Ben had asked him when they were finished eating. "There's a general store across the street."

Mark's glasses flashed in the neon of the diner's flickering sign as he said, "It's almost dark." He didn't like to be outside of the car or a hotel room once the sun went down, even to cross a single-lane street like the one in this dust mote of a town. 

"I won't leave you alone," Ben had promised. He put a hand on Mark's shoulder and squeezed, warm flesh and bone living against his fingers. "I won't."

*

At the Conoco in Globe, Arizona, something seemed to spook Mark.

The Citroën was the only car at the pumps, and Ben was keeping one eye on the teenager who was filling the tank for him. They'd gone into the small retail section of the building to look for a better map to get them from here to the southernmost line of California. Ben had enough money left from the factory job to last them a week or two more before he needed to find work. Any longer and they would have to start sleeping in the car, and Ben was nearly certain that Mark would refuse to sleep in the car. The prospect made his own guts go cold.

He found a few newspapers and joined Mark by the display of road maps. Despite days in the South and the windows down on the car, Mark was still the color of milk, and the dark t-shirt he wore with jeans from the Salvation Army in Youngstown seemed to make him look even paler. Ben worried about the bluish circles under his eyes but knew the shadows under his own weren't any kinder. "Find what we need?" he asked Mark.

"I think so." 

The attendant came in with their bill for the gas. Mark stepped closer to Ben, close enough for Ben to see the goosebumps prickling his arms. There was a fan revolving lazily above their heads, but it only moved the warm air, and didn't cool it. Mark moved closer again and seemed to relax when his arm pressed against Ben's, skin-to-skin. 

Ben wanted to ask if he was all right. Instead, he counted out the worn bills for what they owed. They went back to the car as a Cooper's hawk swooped overhead in the sunshine. Mark shivered violently in the passenger seat for a moment while Ben kept a hand on his knee, sweeping a thumb slowly back and forth over the inner knob of bone. 

Then Mark took a deep breath, unfolded the map carefully, and Ben took his hand away. He watched Mark trace a line, his fingertip barely skimming across the paper. After another minute, Mark asked, "Are we leaving? I think the attendant is watching us."

Ben hadn't even turned the car on yet. "Yes. Are we staying on this road?"

"I think we can keep going west on this." He traced a different line. The edges of his nails were ragged. "Or we could go south, down around Tucson, but..." Mark trailed off, intent on the map. Ben waited. He was in no hurry; they had at least four hours to find a motel before sundown. 

"We'd have to come north again after a while, it doesn't look like there's a western road we could take through the bottom of the state. I think there's a park or something here you have to go around." Mark drew a curving outline around an area on the map. 

The Citroën sputtered a little as Ben started the motor. "West first it is."

*

February turned into March as Mark slept that night in a motel in a tumbleweed speck of a city thirty miles west of Yuma. Ben sat in a chair next to the door, his body tired but his mind unable to quiet down. Tomorrow, they would hopefully reach a place where Ben could look for a job, where they could stay for a month or two while he tried again to sell the new book. Once he did, they would have enough money that they could cross into Mexico and disappear until - Ben didn't know. Until something told them that it was time.

He wondered if the people in the diners and gas stations they had stopped at questioned, silently, why Mark was not in school, why he sat in a booth drinking coffee at ten o'clock in the morning, reading books Ben had checked out of a library three states prior using a false name. "I'll mail them back here before we leave the country," he'd told Mark as they'd walked out with a stack. Mark had looked doubtful, so Ben made sure to copy the address down in the little notebook he carried. 

He wondered if crossing the country with Mark was right, if he should have tried to find a relative in some other part of Maine (or anywhere in the country, even). But even as the thought crossed his mind Ben knew he would not have been able to say goodbye or to leave Mark with someone who had no idea what they had done together in Jerusalem's Lot. 

Mark's body twitched beneath the scratchy hotel comforter like Ben had disturbed him simply by thinking the town's name. Then he sat up partway, mumbling Ben's name like a question with his hands opening and closing into fists above the blanket. "I'm here," Ben said immediately. 

There was a brief light somewhere outside the window, like headlights coming on across the parking lot, and in it Ben saw Mark's eyelids flutter. "I'm here," he repeated. "You can go to back to sleep."

"You should sleep too," Mark sighed, moving over to one side of the lone bed and settling back down. "...drive tomorrow," Ben heard.

He left his battered work boots lined up next to Mark's sneakers by the door and laid down on top of the comforter. He closed his eyes, but he did not sleep. The pillowcase was worn and smelled faintly of an industrial detergent, and the air conditioning unit in the window rattled slightly, but it wasn't enough to keep him awake even if he could have slept. Some time passed. It was still dark when Mark started to wail, plagued by whatever terrifying figures populated his nightmares (Ben could guess), and Ben rolled over to hold him close. 

"It's okay, I'm here," he whispered, as he did every time Mark woke himself up screaming. He pushed the comforter down enough to rub his palm over Mark's back, and felt the sweat that soaked through his t-shirt from his shoulders nearly to his waist. "You're okay. I'm here."

Mark shuddered violently as the cooled air hit the wet material. With an animalistic noise, he yanked the shirt up and over his head, nearly hitting Ben in the face as he did. "Ugh, sorry," he muttered, his breath hitching as he moved forward again into Ben's embrace. 

"It's okay," Ben whispered. Softly, he touched the back of Mark's sweat-hot neck and felt him shake. 

Mark's hand clawed in Ben's shirt, digging in. "I -" 

"I know. Just breathe."

On the nightstand, the Portland _Press-Herald_ sat folded where Ben had left it. On the doorknob, Mark's cross hung mostly without moving, but when a particularly strong wind blew outside, it trembled.

**Author's Note:**

> I offered this fandom for Yuletide 2015 but got a different assignment. smallearthcat's prompt stuck with me, though, so I put it on my list of things to write this year. 
> 
> I was also inspired by this verse from [Giorgos Seferis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgos_Seferis) (the same poet quoted by King at the beginning of the book):
> 
> "It trembled so much  
> I sought it so much  
> in the shade of the eucalyptus  
> Spring to Autumn  
> bare in the close woods  
> my God I sought it"


End file.
